Ibrahim Mahama Brings Ghana’s Industrial Past to Paris
In 1966, a glass bottle factory opened in Aboso, in southwestern Ghana. It was one of the last large projects started under Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first president, before he was overthrown in a military coup that same year. After decades of restructuring and privatisation, the factory was abandoned. According to the Fondation Cartier pour […]
The Art of African Braiding, Through the Eyes of Gen Z
In many African cultures, hair can carry stories from one generation to another. Through braiding and threading techniques, a simple change in appearance can become meaningful, representing different statuses and stages across an individual’s lifespan. Hair traditions were therefore fundamental to a community’s identity, often signifying the crown of its kinship and the core of […]
Architecture as an Atlas of Resonance
It begins in memory: the filtered light of a courtyard, the coolness of a shaded passage, the threshold between public and private. It begins, too, in the physical intelligence of making: the hand drawing a line, shaping a model, testing a material, and turning an intuition into something tangible. Born in Fez, Morocco, the French-Moroccan […]
Akin Faminu on Style, Taste and the Things He Returns To
Akin Faminu can spend one evening watching a 1999 Dolce & Gabbana show and another reading an anatomy textbook from cover to cover. The medical doctor and fashion creator has built a public life around style, but his tastes extend well beyond clothes. For this edition of Word of Mouth, Faminu talks about the designers […]
What Beadwork Is Worth
It took Noormesuku Kereto more than two months to finish the necklace. It was an Enkarewa, the wide beaded collar a Maasai woman wears at her wedding, and this one was made for a safari camp in the Mara rather than for a bride, which changes who will look at it but not how it […]
Heal by Hair: How Communities, Culture, and Trust Are Redefining Mental Health Across Africa
In Siou, a village in Togo’s Kara region, a week before the Évala celebrations, the Heal by Hair Festival revealed a powerful truth: mental health is not only a medical conversation. It is a cultural, social, and collective responsibility. “We speak a great deal about healthcare infrastructure. We speak far less about infrastructures of trust. […]
NAANIYA: The New Language of Modest Fashion
Fashion entered Madina Tangara’s life long before NAANIYA existed. Her father was a sapeur, a man who understood the quiet power of dressing with intention, and her mother carried an effortless elegance and a deep appreciation for style. “I understood early on that clothing could carry meaning beyond appearance,” she says. That conviction became the […]
The Africa Azzedine Alaïa Carried
Azzedine Alaïa left Tunis as a young man and built his life in Paris, but the leaving was never really finished. “Azzedine Alaïa and Africa,” Olivier Saillard’s exhibition at the couturier’s foundation in the Marais, takes that unfinished departure as its subject. There are around fifty pieces, most of them from the collections Alaïa made […]
Aṣọ-Òkè: The Cloth We Inherit
I am standing before a portrait in Nigerian Modernism, the survey at Tate Modern. It is Akinola Lasekan’s 1957 oil of Justus D. Akeredolu. Lasekan and Akeredolu were both first-generation Nigerian modernists who once shared a studio in Lagos, and Akeredolu is remembered as the pioneer of Yoruba thorn carving, so the painter here is […]
Gustavo Nazareno Has Nothing to Explain
Afro-Brazilian painter Gustavo Nazareno on Exu, Candomblé, and a practice that asks to be encountered rather than decoded — ahead of his 2026 Opera Gallery Paris show.